Model your future. Simulate back.

Whathappensify is digital public infrastructure that turns questions about the places and communities you care about into futures anyone can explore, compare, and contest.

  • What happens if the road to the hospital floods?
  • What happens if the city closes our street to cars?
  • What happens if I open my café on the other corner?

You ask your AI assistant a question about a place, in your own words. The assistant sets up a simulation to answer it and shows you the setup before anything runs. You approve it, and then you watch the results in your browser.

See how it worksRead the essay

Why we are building it

City governments and developers already use simulation. When one of them proposes a big change, they can pay experts to model it, and officials use the results to decide what gets built. The people who live with the change usually get a public meeting and a few minutes at a microphone. They rarely have any way to test the proposal themselves or to show what an alternative would do.

Whathappensify lets them do both. You can take a proposal, run it yourself, change the assumptions you disagree with, and put your own version next to it. We call that simulating back.

Read the full essay

How it works

  1. Ask a question

    Tell your AI assistant what you want to know about a place, in your own words.

  2. Check the setup

    The assistant turns your question into a simulation setup: the area, the change, the conditions, and what to measure. It shows you the setup in your browser, and nothing runs until you approve it.

  3. Watch it run

    The results appear on a map, as playback over time, and as numbers.

  4. Compare and change

    Put two versions side by side. If you disagree with an assumption, change it and run the simulation again.

Follow a full example: three designs for a road that floods

What it can simulate

The platform has sixteen simulation models. Some are physical, like how floodwater spreads over the ground. Others are about people, like how traffic moves through streets or how far someone can walk in fifteen minutes.

See all sixteen models, with an example question for each

The limits of a result

Every result keeps a record of the data, the models and the assumptions behind it. The platform also marks what kind of statement a result is. A number someone measured in the world is one kind. A result the simulation computed under your assumptions is another, and the platform keeps the two apart. If the platform lacks the data to answer a question, it says so instead of guessing.

Read the technical reference

Frames

Two people can look at the same result and disagree about what matters. One cares most about travel time, and another cares about flooding near their home. A frame writes down what one person cares about and reads the result that way, under their name. The result itself stays the same for everyone.

Read about frames